Smart matter
Weird dream the other night - a future, of sorts, where the new technology was 'smart matter'. Basically, imagine that everything solid could flow like a liquid under total control, change form, colour, and material, and then become a solid again.
No need for doors or breaks in counters etc - by simply placing the edge of your hand on the appropriate surface, visualising a floating, glowing crystal cylinder, and subvocalising 'excuse me', the matter would kind of boil back from where it had been touched, creating an appropriate space or passage, while the surrounding material took up any architectural strain. Amusingly, the surface patterns/textures which would have dissolved away were often simply split, moved, slid or squashed to one side in a kind of visual 'compression'. My dreams are apparently bucking for a Hollywood FX job.
Clothes could be altered with a few words. Rooms would tidy themselves. Every surface was self-cleaning and would store dust and detritus for molecular reconfiguration. Walls and furniture were infinitely mutable, and buildings nearly so. Things like haircuts and food creation/preparation were almost exclusively automated (and cheap).
There also appeared to be some really neat (alpha?) software available for it, which tapped into global databases as well as personal preferences to get the closest likely match for and command words spoken while visualising the cylinder (apparently this was a neural trigger which could be monitored by the SM). So a short phrase like "Fashion" could change a set of clothes into whatever was fashionable for the time, place, likely subdemographics, and personal history. Sort of a 'Google Everything'. Just about everything in the dream was nearly infinitely tweakable.
The dream was set on some sort of college campus, and most of the students (and dorms) seemed to be heavy users of SM. The dream didn't tell me much about how widely it was used off-campus, but the general 'feel' seemed to be that it was the 'in thing' for the younger crowd, and was moving towards taking most of the industrial and manufacturing world by storm - having actual people create things out of non-SM material being mostly limited to the wealthy, hobbyists, and the tinfoil hat brigade. There was some concern about the waste heat issue, which was about the only thing holding it back from total adoption in almost all markets.
This is my brain on sci-fi and ten to twelve hours' sleep a night.
No need for doors or breaks in counters etc - by simply placing the edge of your hand on the appropriate surface, visualising a floating, glowing crystal cylinder, and subvocalising 'excuse me', the matter would kind of boil back from where it had been touched, creating an appropriate space or passage, while the surrounding material took up any architectural strain. Amusingly, the surface patterns/textures which would have dissolved away were often simply split, moved, slid or squashed to one side in a kind of visual 'compression'. My dreams are apparently bucking for a Hollywood FX job.
Clothes could be altered with a few words. Rooms would tidy themselves. Every surface was self-cleaning and would store dust and detritus for molecular reconfiguration. Walls and furniture were infinitely mutable, and buildings nearly so. Things like haircuts and food creation/preparation were almost exclusively automated (and cheap).
There also appeared to be some really neat (alpha?) software available for it, which tapped into global databases as well as personal preferences to get the closest likely match for and command words spoken while visualising the cylinder (apparently this was a neural trigger which could be monitored by the SM). So a short phrase like "Fashion" could change a set of clothes into whatever was fashionable for the time, place, likely subdemographics, and personal history. Sort of a 'Google Everything'. Just about everything in the dream was nearly infinitely tweakable.
The dream was set on some sort of college campus, and most of the students (and dorms) seemed to be heavy users of SM. The dream didn't tell me much about how widely it was used off-campus, but the general 'feel' seemed to be that it was the 'in thing' for the younger crowd, and was moving towards taking most of the industrial and manufacturing world by storm - having actual people create things out of non-SM material being mostly limited to the wealthy, hobbyists, and the tinfoil hat brigade. There was some concern about the waste heat issue, which was about the only thing holding it back from total adoption in almost all markets.
This is my brain on sci-fi and ten to twelve hours' sleep a night.